In Limbo
by One-Headed Boy
Summary: This is a story about being dead. This is a story about being crazy. This is a story about being asleep. This is a story about being awake after a lifetime of sleeping. I don’t know which it is. I didn’t write this story. I’m just telling it.
1. Overture

**Overture**

This is a story about being dead.

This is a story about being crazy.

This is a story about being asleep. This is a story about being awake after a lifetime of sleeping.

I don't know which it is. I didn't write this story. I'm just telling it.

The truth is that no one makes up anything. Every book, every movie, everything we call fictional actually happens on some level of reality.

The ideas, they come to us as we dream, in sleep or in what we call reality. They come from somewhere else. We go there sometimes when we dream.

The story is true. It just hasn't happened.

It's the story of two lovers separated by their own minds.

It's the story of two humans who only know each other through dreams.

It's the story of two strangers who died 87 years apart without ever knowing each other.

This is a story about reality and how it doesn't mean anything.


	2. Everything In Its Right Place

**Everything In Its Right Place**

"Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon

Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon

Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon

Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon

Everything in its right place..."

Radiohead, _Everything In Its Right Place_

Sometime in January, a girl named Bella Swan woke up at the local hospital of Forks, Washington with no idea as to what she was doing there or how she got there. Her father, Charlie Swan, was at her bedside.

Bella was very confused. The last thing she could remember was placing around her finger a ring from a certain Mr. Edward Cullen, with whom she had recently been engaged. She looked at her hand. There was no ring on it.

"What am I doing here?" she asked.

Charlie informed her that she had been placed here after suffering numerous injuries when Tyler Crowley lost control of his vehicle on the icy school parking lot and struck her.

Bella was even more very confused. She told Charlie that the last thing she could remember was being with Edward.

Charlie asked, who's Edward?

Bella was now totally confused. "Who's Edward?" she said. "The guy who's been my boyfriend over the past two years?"

The past two years? Said Charlie. So this is someone you knew in Phoenix?

"Phoenix? No, dad. _Forks_. The place where I've been, you know, _living_ for the past two years?"

A befuddled Charlie tried to calm Bella and warned her that she should take it easy, she's hit her head pretty hard.

"What are you _talking _about, dad?"

Bella...you've only been living in Forks for a week.

Bella was now just plain bewildered. What has happened to me? She thought. She got out of bed. Despite what she had been told about her injuries, she felt fine. Charlie grabbed her by the shoulders. Bella, you need to stay in bed. Where are you going?

"I have to find Edward," said Bella. "I need to see him."

Charlie's strong hands forced Bella back into the bed, though she struggled. Help! Someone HELP! He cried. A doctor was running to the bed. He had a plastic object in his hand. He placed the object over Bella's nose and mouth as she thrashed about. The object pumped some funny stuff into Bella, and everything was fuzzy and blurry, and then everything was fuzzier and blurrier, and then everything just wasn't.


	3. She Said She Said

**She Said She Said**

"She said

I know what it's like to be dead."

-The Beatles, _She Said She Said_

Edward Cullen was trying to tell himself that what he felt was sadness, and nothing else. It wasn't working.

He was at the funeral. The new girl, just a couple weeks after she moved to Forks, had been hit by a car in the school parking lot. Tyler – the guy that hit her – was pretty messed up about it; he was staying in some sort of hospital. It wasn't his fault, though. It had been icy that day, and his brakes locked up.

Long story short, the girl was dead. Thinking of her as 'the girl' seems a bit gruesome and just wrong to Edward, but he couldn't for the life of him remember her name. She'd sat next to him in science, but they'd hardly said two words to each other before the accident. It wasn't in his nature to make small talk with strangers.

Strangers was what they were, so why the hell was Edward feeling so strange? It wasn't a vague sadness, a sort of guiltiness for intruding on a tragedy he was hardly involved in: it was a sense of..._wrongness_, like it wasn't supposed to happen. Of course, that's what you always say when something like this happens, isn't it? But this was different, like a careless backspaced letter that inadvertently changes the meaning of an entire story. _In making proteins, the deletion of a single nucleotide causes a frameshift mutation, resulting in a completely different translation of the RNA and causing anomalies such as sickle cell anemia,_ Edward's brain responded uselessly. He'd studied hard for the last science test.

Well, one important little nucleotide's ass had gotten itself erased, and now the anomalies were showing up. It wasn't just the weird wrongness Edward was feeling in his gut, which he was trying to find a good analogy for to lessen his anxiety: _like flying halfway to your destination and the plane disappearing beneath your feet...like playing along to a song you've played along to many times before, to find that all the chords have changed...like looking into the face of a loved one and realizing you've never seen it before..._none of them really worked. But it wasn't just this feeling: ever since the girl (her name, what was her _name?_) had died, Edward had started seeing some weird shit out of the corners of his eyes. Sometimes, seeing people with his peripheral vision, it looked like they were naked...sometimes he could see their muscles and bones...sometimes they looked like stick figures. Sometimes it looked like things had _outlines_, thick and black like a child's drawing, and objects seemed to be losing their shadows. He saw cars on fire, driving past as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Sometimes his feet sank into the floor and once he had fallen _through _the floor, into a blue underworld and then, quite suddenly, back to where he had originally been standing, by his locker. After this incident, he found himself incapable of moving his arms at all. Mr. Greene, walking past, had asked Edward if he was feeling all right. Mr. Greene's arm was missing, and bright red liquid was spurting from it. It didn't look anything like real blood, and this made the sight even more disturbing. "I'm fine," said Edward. After Mr. Greene was out of sight, he hit his head on his locker, hard. He couldn't feel anything. He hit again. Nothing. Almost sure he was insane, hit bit his finger. Pain lanced through him like a jolt of electricity. His finger was bleeding, but everything seemed to be returning to normal.

Now, remembering these episodes, which had been suppressing, he realized he was going to have to do something about it. What? How was he supposed to stop this advancing insanity?

But he thought he knew how. _I have to remember her name_, he thought. _It started with a B...Britany? What other girls' name starts with B? Bah beh bih boh buh...damn it, I can't think of anything else? It probably didn't even start with a B...and why am I thinking of Of Montreal?_

Of Montreal...did they do a song that had her name? He closed his eyes and turned up his internal ears, waiting for music to come to him. Eventually it did: _Isabel, would you like to tell about the bell hidden inside your na-a-ame?_

_Isabel!_ Except it wasn't that _exactly_...there was an A at the end, Isabella. And she didn't go by that, she went by...

"Bella," Edward said, and before he knew it, another nucleotide shifted and everything changed again.


End file.
